... The fitness of individual species depends on their ability to persist and establish at low densities, just as the diversity of ecological communities depends on the establishment and persistence of low‐density, “invader” species. Theory predicts that abiotic conditions and the competitive make‐up of resident communities jointly shape invader fitness, limiting the phenotypic identity of successful ...

... In multitrophic systems, the diversity of consumers can affect the abundances and temporal stability of the species they consume via ‘top‐down’ effects. However, little is known about how variation in consumer functional diversity affects the temporal stability of aggregate producer communities. We use data from a long‐term experiment to determine how variation in rodent granivore functional richn ...

... Glomeromycotinan fungi associate with plant roots in a ubiquitous mutualism, the arbuscular mycorrhiza. Vegetation type, spatial distance, and environmental variability represent the three main factors shaping the structure of Glomeromycotinan communities. We present here one of the most comprehensive reports on Glomeromycotinan community structure in forest ecosystems, covering five ecosystem typ ...

... This account presents information on all aspects of the biology of Aesculus hippocastanum L. (horse‐chestnut) that are relevant to understanding its ecological characteristics and behaviour. The main topics are presented within the standard framework of the Biological Flora of the British Isles: distribution, habitat, communities, responses to biotic factors, responses to environment, structure an ...

... Spatial variation in abiotic and biotic factors creates local contexts that influence the intensity of plant–herbivore interactions. Some previous studies have accounted for the complexity of these interactions with latitudinal clines, while the absence of such clines in many other systems suggests other, often unknown, local community factors may instead explain the variation in herbivory across ...

... “Old fields” are ecosystems that have been previously managed and subsequently abandoned, usually from agricultural use. These systems are classic testing grounds for hypotheses about community assembly. However, old field succession can be difficult to predict: seemingly similar fields often diverge in terms of species composition and environmental conditions. Here, we test the relative roles of ...

... Long‐term ecosystem development involves changes in plant community composition and diversity associated with pedogenesis and nutrient availability, but comparable changes in soil microbial communities remain poorly understood. In particular, it is unclear whether the diversity of plants and microbes respond to similar abiotic drivers, or become decoupled as resources change over long time‐scales. ...

... Successional theory lacks an explicit, conceptual integration across types of disturbances and biomes. Most successional research addresses site‐ or process‐specific questions, but extrapolation of the findings to broad scales is limited. Studies of plant succession are often distinguished by the severity of the disturbance that triggers them (severely disturbed: primary; less severely disturbed: ...

... Ecological succession – how biological communities re‐assemble and change over time following natural or anthropogenic disturbance – has been studied since the birth of ecology, and the resulting theoretical framework underpins many aspects of the discipline. Recently, the mechanistic basis of classic succession theory has been advanced by studies of plant and microbial interactions, functional tr ...

... Facilitation studies have previously focused on the effects of plant–plant interactions on species richness and, more recently, on functional traits or phylogenetic aspects. Little is known, however, about the simultaneous effects that facilitation have on overall biodiversity, jointly considering taxonomic, functional and phylogenetic diversity. In this study, we investigated shrub facilitation o ...

... Widespread degradation of tropical forests is caused by a variety of disturbances that interact in ways that are not well understood. To explore potential synergies between edge effects, fire and windstorm damage as causes of Amazonian forest degradation, we quantified vegetation responses to a 30‐min, high‐intensity windstorm that in 2012, swept through a large‐scale fire experiment that borders ...

... Current understanding of mutualistic networks is grounded largely in data on interaction frequency, yet mutualistic network dynamics are also shaped by interaction quality—the functional outcomes of individual interactions on reproduction and survival. The difficulty of obtaining data on functional outcomes has resulted in limited understanding of functional variation among a network's pairwise sp ...

... Local tree species distributions in tropical forests correlate strongly with soil water availability. However, it is unclear how species distributions are shaped by demographic responses to soil water availability. Specifically, it remains unknown how growth affects species distributions along water availability gradients relative to mortality. We quantified spatial variation in dry season soil wa ...

... Tree lines are supposed to react sensitively to the current global change. However, the lack of a long‐term (millennial) perspective on tree line shifts in the Pyrenees prevents understanding the underlying ecosystem dynamics and processes. We combine multiproxy palaeoecological analyses (fossil pollen, spores, conifer stomata, plant macrofossils, and ordination) from an outstanding ice cave depos ...

... The forests of Amazonia are among the most biodiverse on Earth, yet accurately quantifying how species composition varies through space (i.e., beta‐diversity) remains a significant challenge. Here, we use high‐fidelity airborne imaging spectroscopy from the Carnegie Airborne Observatory to quantify a key component of beta‐diversity, the distance decay in species similarity through space, across th ...

... Arctic shrub expansion is occurring across large parts of the tundra biome and its potential ecological repercussions have been widely discussed. But while the term “shrub expansion” often implicitly refers to an increase in tall, deciduous species such as birch and willow, several studies have also found a strong increase in evergreen dwarf shrubs in response to warming, a fact which has received ...

... Inbreeding and herbivory can interactively reduce the performance of flowering plants. Here, we investigated whether the magnitude of plant inbreeding depression increases under herbivory as a result of diminished leaf metabolic responses to herbivory in inbreds, which entails increased herbivore growth and feeding damage. We additionally explored whether genetic differentiation among native and i ...

... It is now commonplace for community ecologists to infer assembly processes from the evolutionary relatedness of co‐occurring species. Such inferences, however, have typically depended on assembly theories that assume competitive equilibrium and that are species based. In reality, all natural communities are dynamic, particularly during the course of succession, and the ecological interactions whic ...

... Most fragmentation research focuses on the effects of carving up old‐growth forests, but less is known about influences of habitat fragmentation on secondary succession in patches of regenerating forests. Working with forest dynamics on islands in a vast lake created by a hydroelectric dam in China (the Thousand Island Lake), we sampled 29 islands that were cleared of forest during dam constructio ...